JIM's Abacus for Minimap

Does your Minimap suffer from button congestion?
Does it keep you up all night with shuffling, squeezing, and lost information?

JIM has the cure! One dose of Abacus for Minimap clears up button congestion quickly and effectively - with no fumbling through menus!

FEATURE: Unobtrusive and Automatic Setup

When you first enable Abacus, it will appear to have no effect. This is because it does not want to disturb you.
The next time you go ''AFK'' (Away From Keyboard), Abacus will begin a search for AddOn buttons.
This search does not suspend your game - Abacus plays nice and takes its turn.

To start an early automatic setup, type: /abacus

FEATURE: On-the-Fly Adjustments

When setup is complete, Abacus will spread buttons out around the edge of the Minimap.
It will continue to do this as long as it is installed, remembering the placement of buttons - even invisible buttons!
Some AddOns cause their buttons to appear and disappear. Abacus will make room for those too.

FEATURE: Average and Locked Placement

You will probably not want buttons to cover the entire circle of the Minimap.
To keep buttons away from certain arcs, turn one or two buttons into ''locked'' buttons.

When setup is complete, all buttons can be dragged around the Minimap by holding the left mouse click on them.
To make a ''locked'' button, keep the mouse pointer over it when you release the mouse click.

If you move the mouse pointer away while dragging, the button will be an ''average'' button, and will be placed by Abacus.

FEATURE: Hide Any Button! Add Any Button!

During setup (type /abacus), you can pull the buttons in and out to set them into hidden and shown positions. When setup closes, all hidden buttons will disappear. When setup opens, hidden buttons reappear.

You can use the same technique to include buttons that automatic setup missed. Hold the ALT key and pull on one of these missed buttons. You will see it spring into a new place on the Minimap. This means it is now included. Be careful - ALT can add any button to the Abacus ring permanently!

FEATURE: Square Minimap Support

Players that prefer other map shapes to round ones can set Abacus accordingly. When you take Abacus out of its ZIP package, put 1 file from the "map" folders up with the rest of the files. The change will take effect the next time World of Warcraft is run, and will affect all characters played from your computer. You only have to do this once.

JIM's version rules:

The first two parts of the version number (2.x) are the same as a compatible version number of World of Warcraft.
Whenever any JIM AddOn is updated, all JIM AddOns that update after it will have the same version number or higher.

Changed in version 2.0.36:

o Updated TOC for WoW 2.0.3 patch.

Changed in version 2.0.35:

o Added: “Apply MapShape”. Building on the square minimap concept, and the request of the person named “DCUI2”, I have made it possible for unlimited minimap shapes to be programmed for Abacus. Included in this initial package are the “Default” (round minimap), “Square” (square), and “TopRight” (a square with a rounded corner). Please play around with this idea as you like.
The people that followed the Square Minimap instructions for past versions of Abacus will need to do so again.

o Tweaked: the efficiency of some of the algorithms. Probably not perceivable in gameplay.

Changed in version 2.0.34:

o Improved: Buttons added manually to the Abacus ring (with ALT) now push adjacent, unlocked buttons aside, so that you know an addition was successful.

o Fixed: Buttons that were found while hidden did not show at the time of their discovery – now they do.

o Fixed: Buttons formerly ignored by the automatic search are no longer ignored. These include the +/- buttons and the Map Button coming in the next patch. The Game-Time Button is still ignored intentionally.

o Fixed: Buttons like the Battlegounds button, which is frequently hidden, will not be forced into hiding when they would prefer to be shown.

o Issue (related to the above fix): If something in the game shows or hides a button, Abacus will not impose your hide/show choice instead. JIM is looking for an elegant solution to this problem.

o Issue: Abacus appears to be capable of crashing the program. It often causes a crash when you exit the world, after important data is saved. This issue may be a problem with World of Warcraft. If it is, JIM cannot fix it.

E.G.: Gatherer was identified as a severe conflict. To fix this, I changed Abacus so that objects with numbers in their name will be left alone. Players everywhere should find, to their joy, that the next version of Abacus will play nice with Gatherer.

END QUOTE.

So if I edit the xml of certain minimap buttons and add a number to their name ... abacus will ignore it??

If so then this will help me greatly to tell abacus which buttons not to try to grab because they dont play well with abacus.

Originally posted by maytrix having same errors as Delva when trying to move a button, also
wouild like the ability to remove/exclude a button from abacus.

Hello, maytrix!

Your request merits some discussion here, out where people can see it. (I'll make a Feature Request entry in My Portal later.) Let me say, the idea of an exclude list has been considered, but at this time I do not intend to add this level of customizability.

You deserve to know why. It's sort of complex - my thinking, and the feature itself. Includes and Excludes work great when people have an easy way to identify things, like spells. Spells all have one name, and sometimes a "rank". However, Excludes are not easy in the world of buttons and other highly visual concepts.

A person like yourself can say to me, "There! That's a button. Please exclude that." I see what you see, and think like you do, so I personally could find a way to treat the button as you want.

Programs see so much more of the button than we do. To get the program thinking like you think in all possible cases is on the calibre of God, well beyond me, and even if I could approximate it, I think you'd have to have the same skill with my AddOns as I do to master the solution. That shouldn't be necessary, and seems like bad programming.

So here's what I'm doing instead.

In the coming versions, beginning with 1.12.31, Abacus will act one way when performing automatic searches. It will act another way when you hold ALT and manually configure the Minimap buttons. And there will be two new options that let you 1) reset Abacus completely, and 2) turn the automatic searches off.

I will continue to refine automatic searches so that they are more clever about things, but I expect there will forever be subtleties to certain AddOns that people will either have to accept or work around. That said, please do continue to make suggestions. One thing I find particularly helpful is if you link specific AddOns that do not work with Abacus. That way, I can install them, see what you see, and plan around that.

E.G.: Gatherer was identified as a severe conflict. To fix this, I changed Abacus so that objects with numbers in their name will be left alone. Players everywhere should find, to their joy, that the next version of Abacus will play nice with Gatherer.

*whew*. I really blabbed on here, didn't I? Thank you for your request, and thank you for listening.
~JIM

having same errors as Delva when trying to move a button, also
wouild like the ability to remove/exclude a button from abacus. I have a couple mods that set to parent of the minimap and abacus will grab them and throw them around a lil funny.
The mod in question is shardace.

Great idea. I'm running into issues with positioning and saving for the Square Minimap. I'm using the SimpleMinimap mod, along with some Fubar2 plugins set to the minimap. They seem to move around the minimap ok, but I've encountered the following error when moving some of the minimap icons around:

I've many icons around my minimap, and many of them were spread around with a higher radius. This was before I tried abacus...
Using Abacus all of my icons are sorted around the closest circle around the minimap. Icons that were fixed to a larger radius are moved closer to the minimap. This way many of my icons do overlap and clicking them is difficult or even impossible.

Maybe abacus can be prevented from putting icons with overlaping areas? A way out could be to start puting icons on the second circle, if the first circle is filled. This would overcome the problem of overlapping icons.

On both circles it would be nice, to have the possibility to restrict abacus to place icons between a given range. Moving Icons from the inner circle to the outer one (and vice versa) would also be great.

As much as I love the idea of the addon, is there a way maybe you can allow the users to pick and confirm? So basically like this, there's 2 minimap (for the sake of simplicity), one at 360, one at 0. There should be a dialog that says "button one is at 0, button two is at 360, would you like it like this or would you like to move it? If so, please specify degree". Moving it by mouse is hard, by interface scroll is hard, very very few mods allow you to type in numbers and move it from there.

I've noticed an oddity in the new version (.11.28). Occasionally, (I haven't yet narrowed down the circumstances) I'm unable to click on certain minimap icons (not all). Interestingly, the old buttonhole addon used to exhibit the same behavior with those same buttons! Namely, Atlas and Yatlas are exhibiting the issue. Again, it doesn't occur always, just occasionally. I'll let you know if I manage to isolate the circumstances. That said, the previous version did not suffer from this problem at all, if that helps you isolate to a specific change. Anything you can do would be appreciated. Thanks.